Over the last couple of weeks I have given a number of interesting interviews.
If you missed them, you might like to catch up on the replays. These include with Rodney Hide on RCR where we discuss Ayurveda, diet, and health, also with Paul Brennan on RCR Breakfast where we discuss the International Genetic Charter and with Marc Morano on TNT (who has a global audience) where we had a wide ranging discussion.
I also had a comprehensive interview with Leighton Smith on his Newstalk ZB podcast series which brings me to today’s topic. Leighton was correctly concerned, as I know many of you are, that those responsible for rigidly enforcing lockdowns and mandates should be held to account, especially if they overstepped the mark. Ashley Bloomfield’s name was cited. Dr Bloomfield was formerly Jacinda Ardern’s Director General of Health who zealously enforced Covid vaccine mandates even for many known to be already vaccine injured. Leighton and I had a difference of emphasis on this point, I feel we need to cast a very wide net and change the fundamental direction of bioscience research in addition to focusing on individual roles.
I am currently reading The Code Breaker by prolific biographer Walter Isaacson. Isaacson gushes praise for biotechnology and especially for biotechnologists. He references cures for genetic disorders such as Huntington’s, sickle cell anaemia and cystic fibrosis and writes as though these are already available. He also expects cures for deafness, blindness, cancers, depression, etc., and anticipates designer babies all sorted for height, IQ, skin colour and strength.
His naive, unquestioning acceptance of this industry public relations hype and wild bioscience fiction astounds me. None of the above ‘cures’ exist. If he had done some deeper research, Isaacson would have struggled to uncover even one example of long term safe benefit from biotechnology. Commercial biotechnology is a vast industry built on dreams.
One of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, James Watson, writes in his biography The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA that on completion of their model, his partner Francis Crick rushed into a pub in Cambridge shouting “we have found the secret of life”. As it has turned out, Crick might have better announced “We have found out how to destroy the secret of life”.
Along with sequencing the human genome, biochemists, rather like kindergarten children with their first scissors, began a program of cutting and snipping to alter the secret of life and find out what they could do without the help of nature or God. The discovery of DNA began an era of biotechnology that has become a global industry with one million people employed worldwide generating half a trillion dollars of revenue in 2022, but producing virtually no actual cures of disease or beneficial products. The opposite in fact, a vast industry built on a failed understanding of life that is delivering death and disease to millions.
This brings me back to Ashley Bloomfield. He is just one player functioning in a vast network of mistaken scientific endeavour whose paradigm casts them as guardians of the secret of life. Apparently this somehow gives biotechnologists the right to tell everyone in the world what to do. Precisely the project that Dr. Ashley Bloomfield now chairs at the World Health Organisation.
So how do you reverse a global scientific consensus which mistakenly believes itself to be the gatekeeper of the secret of life, but understands almost nothing about how cellular genetics supports conscious life?
Back in the 90’s I presented evidence concerning the risks of genetic modification of foods before the NZ Royal Commission on Genetic Modification. The labelling of GM foods became a cause that captured the public’s imagination and I am sure initially protected many from harm. Although unfortunately synthetic biotechnology has since crept into the processed food sector largely unannounced and unlabelled.
I remember around that time there were also a number of discussions about the risks of gene technology in the health sector. There was a general feeling among those working in biochemistry that nothing should jeopardise the search for cures to genetically inherited diseases like cystic fibrosis. So virtually nothing was said on this subject at the Commission hearings.
In retrospect, this reluctance to publicly flag the potential risks of experimental gene therapy was a huge mistake. It allowed experimentation with novel gene interventions to continue more or less unimpeded. Its regulation was left to the enthusiastic biotechnologists who were conducting the research themselves. The fox was guarding the hen house, and the stage was set for Covid-19.
Last week we published The International Genetic Charter and invited you to sign up to its simple provisions designed to protect the public from harmful biotechnology experimentation. If you haven’t already done so, please sign and circulate the charter. This can be a first step to enhance public awareness of the risks and remedies. To fix the vast problems in the health and food sectors that biotechnology is creating, regulation and information will be insufficient on their own. To persuade public acceptance of change you need to offer alternatives.
When it comes to food you don’t have to look very far. Articles on the benefits of fresh whole foods and the dangers of ultra processed foods appear almost daily in the popular press. Like these in the Guardian entitled “Ultra-processed foods are ultra-bad for you. Here’s what to know” and “I went a week without ultra-processed foods. Here’s what I learned“. These are backed by serious science. A wide range of inflammatory diseases including diabetes and many others are affected by poor quality food and benefitted by a fresh diet. The risk of developing the big killers including heart disease and cancer can be significantly reduced if you follow simple lifestyle and dietary guidelines.
Modern medicine has developed powerful diagnostic tools which have proved invaluable in the early detection of disease. More recently genetic tests have began to reveal that some people may inherit a predisposition to certain diseases. There is an ongoing debate on the ethics of treating diseases that haven’t yet developed and might never do so. Especially when the treatments can themselves be ineffective and even harmful.
So can you go even further than these? Ayurveda, the ancient health science of India still practiced widely today, offers its own system of early detection and treatment. Ayurveda understands the body in terms of three fundamental principles or doshas: Vata (roughly information and transport systems), Pitta (digestion and transformation systems) and Kapha (structure and stability systems). According to Ayurveda, it is the balance between these three systems that determines health.
Ayurveda utilises a pulse diagnosis system that is able to detect the early genesis of illness before any overt symptoms of disease develop. It describes the development of disease in six stages.
- Imbalance: Lack of coordination between the doshas develops
- Location: The imbalance moves and locates in a particular part of body
- Accumulation: The imbalance grows and deposits obstructing material
- Decay: The accumulated material festers
- Symptoms: The first serious overt symptoms appear such as discomfortable, pin, swelling or rash etc.
- Disease: The effects spread and become an identifiable disease
Ayurvedic diagnostic techniques can detect these early stages of imbalance and then offer multiple treatment modalities paired with the specific characteristics of the imbalance to restore balance between the doshas and thus prevent the disease before it arises. These interventions may include simple dietary and lifestyle advice, herbal supplements and specific procedures to cleanse the accumulated waste products.
Perhaps some of the more surprising features of Ayurveda are its simple and easily acquired self help preventative steps that can be followed at home. Including self-pulse diagnosis, body typing, daily routines, yoga, meditation and self cleanse procedures such as oil massage. Find out more about preventive health care in my book Your DNA Diet.
The predominance of allopathy and now biotechnology appears to be sowing the seeds of future disease rather than offering cure. More than 50% of adults now suffer from chronic or persistent illness. Palliative medications such as painkillers are overused and abused. Antibiotic resistance is growing. As a result, bacterial infections are becoming extremely difficult to treat. Fungi, parasites and viruses are also developing drug resistance.
To cap it all, mass use of mRNA vaccine technology has been identified in an article published by the BMJ as a factor contributing to excess deaths. It warned that side effects linked to the Covid vaccine had included ischaemic stroke, acute coronary syndrome and brain haemorrhage, cardiovascular diseases, coagulation, haemorrhages, gastrointestinal events and blood clotting.
The massive gains in longevity over the last two hundred years are mainly due to improvements in hygiene, diet, housing, sanitation and lifestyle. During the last decade this long standing direction of improving longevity has begun to reverse. This should be ringing alarm bells in the medical profession where the reliance on allopathy and now biotechnology has overshadowed the far more effective and safe measures of preventive medicine. This imbalance needs to be corrected. Comprehensive information on preventive measures needs to be incorporated into our educational and health systems. It is worth remembering that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If we want to repair our wounded and weary health service we need to revisit this old adage and take it very seriously indeed.
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Guy Hatchard PhD was formerly a senior manager at Genetic ID a global food testing and safety company (now known as FoodChain ID). You can subscribe to his websites HatchardReport.com and GLOBE.GLOBAL for regular updates by email.
He is the author of ‘Your DNA Diet: Leveraging the Power of Consciousness To Heal Ourselves and Our World. An Ayurvedic Blueprint For Health and Wellness’.
